For Death Comes Softly (8 page)

The case proved to be every bit as much of a nightmare as I had feared. Fortunately a little light relief beckoned. My oldest and best friend, Julia Jones, a top London showbusiness journalist, announced that she was coming to stay for a couple of days – for the first time since Simon and I had parted. That was how it was between Julia and me. We didn't wait for polite invitations. On the Friday evening that she was due to arrive I left Lockleaze a couple of hours earlier than usual and picked her up at Bristol Temple Meads.

Julia was quite meticulous in her personal habits and, also earning considerably more than I did, lived in some style and total order in a luxury flat overlooking the River Thames near Chelsea Bridge. She was not impressed with my accommodation. I had moved into my room with a loo, which was about all it was really, when I tired of the police quarters to which I had resorted immediately after my marriage broke up. The so-called studio flat boasted a single divan and a rickety sofa which could, with some difficulty, be transformed into an equally rickety bed, and which Julia eyed with a considerable lack of enthusiasm. Her manner made it quite apparent that she rather wished she had booked herself into a nearby hotel and when I indicated that I was planning to make us pasta for supper on the rather grimy hob balanced on a metal table in what passed as the kitchen area, she could no longer conceal her horror.

‘But you can't cook!' she exclaimed, fully aware that throughout my married life Simon had done all the cooking and pretty well everything else in our house as well. Even I had to admit that he may have had a point in having regarded me as a thoroughly lousy wife.

‘I'm learning,' I said. ‘I've had no alternative. I can't afford to eat out all the time. You'll be surprised, honestly.'

‘No, I won't,' she announced, tossing her impressive head of bouncy red hair in a way that dared me to challenge her. ‘Learn on somebody else. We're going out. I've still got an expense account, just about. Remember.'

We went to a rather good little Chinese restaurant I had discovered within easy walking distance. Even Julia, who was a fearful Chinese food snob and thought there were no really good Chinese restaurants in the UK outside London or Manchester, admitted that it wasn't bad and tucked in enthusiastically to a virtual banquet of assorted fishy starters, crispy duck with pancakes, her favourite chilli beef and my favourite chicken with cashew nuts.

We giggled our way through the evening as usual. We were an odd couple Julia and I, not least physically. She was a good six feet tall and towered over me. Our mutual friends thought that anyone seeing us together would automatically assume Julia was the cop and I was the journalist. We had definitely got things the wrong way around, they said. Julia, however, insisted that was nonsense as her extra height had been essential in order for her to see over other people's heads during her many years of standing on doorsteps – whereas a police officer could just arrest anyone who got in her way and have them promptly despatched to jail, she said.

However we might have looked, Julia and I had a magical friendship. She was the only contemporary from my schooldays that I was still in touch with, or come to that, would even have wished to be still in touch with. Whenever we met, after not having seen each other for months sometimes, it was always as if we had parted company only the day before. We were so close that often it seemed as if we could read each other's minds. I confided in Julia in a way I never had with anyone else in my life, really, not even Simon.

Only Julia knew how deeply affected I had been by the serial murder case I had headed around the time Simon and I were breaking up, and how, partly in a final bid to save my marriage, I had come close then to resigning from the force. So when she asked me how The Job was going, it was more than a polite enquiry and one of the few more serious moments of our evening.

‘God knows,' I sighed. ‘Being deputy chief of the CPT no longer looks like such a great career move with Titmuss the Terrible in charge. And as for moving into Child Protection after nearly cracking up on a murder case – well I must be barking mad, mustn't I?'

‘Probably,' Julia remarked through a mouthful of beef and noodles. ‘You didn't nearly crack up, though. You'd nearly had enough, that's all, and it's different.'

‘Maybe,' I responded. ‘Nonetheless, Child Protection is considered the highest risk area of all for breakdowns among police officers. Did you know they only let you do the job for a maximum of five years?'

‘As long as that?' Julia enquired, her eyes open wide in mock amazement. ‘Heavens, Rose, that's about five times as long as I've known you stick at anything.'

I found myself giggling again. That was usually the way with Julia. A night out and a few drinks with her had always been better than any of the therapy sessions the force and the world in general suddenly appeared to be rife with.

After we'd finished two bottles of house white and moved on to a couple of large brandies of uncertain origin, I decided to treat her to a full account of my Abri Island adventure. Well, I really needed to tell someone, and who better than Julia. She sussed out my feelings for Robin Davey at once, the old bat.

‘When are you seeing him again?' she asked.

‘He's engaged to be married,' I said sturdily.

‘So?' she enquired, calling for more brandies.

Four

The morning after Julia returned to London I received a phone call I had been expecting but not looking forward to, from my former husband, Simon.

‘We're ready to exchange contracts,' he said coldly. ‘I've got a load of paper work for you to look at and I need your signature.'

‘Fine,' I said, trying to sound as if selling the home in which I had shared my life with him for twelve years was really of no consequence at all.

‘I'd like to move as quickly as possible now,' he went on very formally.

‘Fine,' I said again.

‘So, is it all right if I come around to your place this evening?'

I started to agree to that too and stopped myself only just in time, remembering Julia's reaction to the so-called studio flat I was renting. It was a complete tip. To be fair, it hadn't been that bad when I moved in, and it was in a big old Victorian villa in a nice part of town, but the fact remained, whatever fancy names you gave it, it was only a bedsit, and I had not been born to live in one room. I rented on a weekly basis, at a highly inflated price, and the place had been intended merely as very temporary accommodation when I had moved in more than six months previously. I was still there and the room was now buried in clutter and junk. It also seriously needed fumigating. But you couldn't get past the clutter to clean it, even if I had had any inclination to do so, which I didn't.

I had yet to allow Simon near my own personal tip and I had no wish for him to see the way I was living. Whatever his emotional state, I knew that Simon would always be surrounded by order. That's the way he was. In fact in the good old days he had been inclined to joke that he had obviously made a mistake and should have married Julia, who of course, also always lived in total order. At least I think he had been joking.

‘Uh, couldn't we meet for a drink somewhere,' I suggested desperately.

‘Rose,' he replied, in the kind of voice you might use to a tiresome child. ‘We need to make the final arrangements for the sale of our home. That's not something you do in a bar.'

‘Oh,' I said. And I supposed he was right, really.

‘Look,' he still sounded like someone exasperated struggling to remain patient, ‘if you don't want me to come to you, why don't you pop round here. It won't take long.'

I should have said no to that as well. The ‘round here' he referred to was the idiosyncratic 1920s bungalow on the outskirts of town which had been our home throughout our marriage, and where, by and large, and I hated admitting it to myself now, we had both been happy for so long. Well, I had anyway. Sometimes now I doubted if I had ever made Simon really happy.

I arrived just after 8 p.m., straight from work. Simon was alone. That at least was a relief. I had heard that he had a new girlfriend. I didn't know whether she was living with him or not, but I did know that I didn't want to meet her.

He opened the front door to me with barely a word of greeting and out of habit I walked straight into the kitchen. A pot of soup was simmering on the stove. Typical. Simon was a great cook who always liked to have something delicious and nourishing on the go.

‘That smells good,' I said, sniffing the air, and trying, I suppose, to make small talk.

Another of my mistakes, apparently.

‘Pity you didn't show some appreciation when you had the chance,' he sneered.

I was exasperated, and saddened yet again.

‘Oh Simon, can't we at least be civil,' I heard myself plead.

‘It's a bit late for you to start observing the niceties of life, don't you think?' he countered.

I felt myself flinch. Extraordinary that he could still do that to me.

‘Let's just get the paper work sorted, shall we?' he continued.

I nodded tiredly. Meticulous as ever he explained the mathematics to me, and showed me where to sign. I knew he would never cheat me nor anyone else for that matter. It wasn't in his nature. Our home and our finances had been divided precisely down the middle.

‘Now are you sure you understand and are happy with everything?' he asked. God, why was it that every man I encountered seemed determined to patronise me?

‘I don't want there to be any comebacks,' he went on, with just a hint of veiled menace, just in case, I supposed, I should be daft enough to misinterpret the reasons behind his concern.

‘It's all fine, Simon,' I told him, without a lot of interest. He had a point actually, because he knew I was barely sitting up and taking notice. I was past caring, as it happened. I had after all already concluded that dividing up two lives which had been entwined as one for so long was about the most deeply depressing exercise in the world, and dividing a home was the final step.

If I'd realised how much going back to the bungalow, for the first time since we had finally parted irrevocably eight months earlier, would affect me, I might have been more insistent that we met elsewhere. I couldn't help remembering the last night we had spent there together. We had made wonderful passionate love and I had kidded myself that we would be able to start again, to rebuild our lives together. But the next morning we had achieved a quarrel which, even by our standards, had reached an exceptional level of devastation.

As I climbed into my car and took one last lingering look at our little house on the hill I was silently weeping.

My next bit of near madness may have been triggered by that fraught meeting with Simon, I suppose, or perhaps I was being kind to myself. One way or another my personal life remained a disaster area. I sometimes thought I was on self-destruct.

A week or so before Christmas I was in the Lockleaze local, the Vintage Inn, sending a young DC rousingly on the way to his wedding the next day, an occasion of obligatory jollity which did nothing for my depression, when I came close to excelling myself in the stupidity department.

I was drinking that special brand of white wine in which English pubs specialise. It's the sort that only becomes remotely palatable after you have swallowed far too much of it. A requisite of the culture also inevitably demands that the stuff should be served lukewarm, and preferably from a bottle first opened at least a couple of weeks earlier. By closing time the remains of my brain had deserted me and the DC's best man, a sergeant with the Met whom earlier in the evening I had dismissed as too clever by half, suddenly became devastatingly attractive. In any case, what else did I have to do that night, I found myself wondering morosely.

The one thing I had managed to avoid in my life, so far at least, was allowing what I did or didn't do privately to become public knowledge around the nicks of the Avon and Somerset. Of course all who had the remotest interest knew about Simon and my divorce, but, as far as I was aware, and with the possible exception of Peter Mellor, nobody had a clue about what kind of sex life I now had. They certainly, I hoped, had no idea that occasional one-night stands, often embarked upon with disreputable alacrity, were about the sum of it. I had at least avoided playing around with coppers. Somehow on this night, in a state of mind doubtless not unconnected with all that cheap white wine, I was past caring.

‘Why don't I take you away from all this,' murmured the Met sergeant unoriginally as he nuzzled an undefined but suddenly inexplicably erotic area just behind my left ear.

In addition his trousers had started to take on a life of their own.

I didn't mess about. ‘Let's go,' I said, pretending not to notice the collective nudging and winking which followed us to the door. And that was where my Met friend began to blow it.

‘I've never shagged a DCI before,' he remarked conversationally, breathing beer at me.

We were outside on the pavement by then, swaying gently, in the cold night air. And as the cool freshness of it hit me, just a hint of sanity returned. What was I, some kind of novelty act?

At that moment, with familiarly miraculous timing, Peter Mellor appeared from nowhere. I couldn't even remember if he'd been in the pub all evening – another of my lapses – but he seemed, as usual come to think of it, to be completely sober. Peter Mellor didn't like getting drunk. He was the kind of man who always ensured that he remained in control.

‘Going your way boss, if you want a lift,' he said to me casually, then switched his gaze coldly to the Met sergeant who removed his arm from my shoulder and leaned unsteadily against the pub wall.